Profligate leftist prostitution partying from who knows where. || "It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality." -- JG Ballard. || "You try running with your sagging breasts down the middle of the fucking street. People will throw a blanket over you. And grab you. And call the police. For fuck's sake." -- Germaine Greer.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Through the prism.

Whenever the security services are criticised, we always get the same boilerplate response. They do amazing work keeping us safe; they have to get it right every time while our enemies only have to be lucky once; we can't possibly be told of everything they're doing to protect us so they often prevent attacks we never even hear about it; and so on. To which the obvious answer is: well, no shit. The point surely is that with great power comes great responsibility. As with the police or any other state service, they have to be held to account, even if everything can't be disclosed for very good reasons.

When William Hague then says the law abiding have nothing to fear from GCHQ potentially having access to almost every piece of information an individual has shared with the majority of the internet giants via the US National Security Agency's Prism programme, you ought to know that the opposite is the case. The old trope about those who have nothing to hide having nothing to be concerned about is so hoary that it shouldn't really need to be answered, but it ought to be even more ridiculous in a sad age of "revenge porn" and when so many share their most intimate secrets online. Almost every single person has something in their past that they wouldn't want to become common knowledge, or which they would only ever share with their closest friends and family. I most certainly have.

You don't have to be Alex Jones to be worried that while this data collection might currently be used to (in the main) protect us, it wouldn't take much for it to be used for mass surveillance, and indeed probably already is in any number of authoritarian states. It should also concern us that contrary to the assurances from politicians, the tide is in fact towards ensuring the security services are further beyond proper scrutiny. The justice and security bill that ensures there won't be a repeat of the "seven paragraphs" casehas become law, the Gibson inquiry's report (what there is of it) is still yet to be published, while the Chilcot inquiry also seems to be stuck in limbo. The communications data bill will eventually get passed in some form or another, precisely because the securocrats have too much influence and power for it not to be. Just as we have an independent commission to monitor the police, so we should have a genuinely independent one for the intelligence agencies. What we'll continue to have instead is the stonewalling and obfuscation that Hague in the main delivered to parliament today, along with the usual toadying from the majority on all sides.